About

Become my snail mail penpal. /uses /now Changelog Sitemap emilynhoward AT proton me

I'm Emily Nick Howard (they or she), a writer and maker. I learned to code websites as a teenager from 2000-2004. In March 2024, I began re-learning those skills and created this website. You can find out more about my interests, beliefs, and personality by reading what's here.

My main goal in making this site has been to share my writing. I publish my poems and prose, as well as share various interests.

About This Site

If you're looking for "web manifesto," this essay is about as close as I've got. If you're curious about why I choose to self-publish through this website, you can find my rationale here.

A website is a place for connection; a place to transmit ideas, experiences, and feelings from human to human. Building a website is simultaneously an act of creativity and service. My website is full of content that I have created because I’m me, but if I don’t design it in such a way that it’s widely accessible, I am failing to use it as a tool of communication.

Every page on this site was hand-coded by me using HTML and CSS only. This site is built with two sets of values:

Accessibility & Sustainability

These are features that I have built in or plan to build in as my skills grow:

  • mobile responsiveness
  • high-contrast text
  • lightweight, fast-loading pages and images
  • dark mode capability
  • semantic tags and alt text for screen readers

Progress over Perfection

That being said, even a small website takes a lot of time to build by hand. I appreciate your patience as I learn and I don’t expect to get everything right the first time.

I am not a developer or coder; I have no background in computer science, UI/UX, or graphic design. I’m just a person who for some reason enjoys messing with HTML and CSS to make things functional and attractive. I appreciate this site as a container for imperfection and messiness.

This site is, and will always be, under construction.

What is a Bone Folder?

A bone folder is a bookbinding implement used to crease, score, smooth, burnish, and shape paper, book cloth, and book board. It is a very useful implement, being relevant to almost every stage of making a book. It is called a bone folder because it is traditionally made out of bone, although you can now get them made out of plastic and teflon. My bone folder is my favorite tool I own, always ready to help assorted flat materials transform into something three-dimensional, useful, and meaningful: a book.